Introducing a Global Dataset on Conflict Forecasts and News Topics

This article provides a structured description of openly available news topics and forecasts for armed conflict at the national and grid cell level starting January 2010. The news topics as well as the forecasts are updated monthly at conflictforecast.org and provide coverage for more than 170 countries and about 65,000 grid cells of size 55x55km worldwide.

Using Past Violence and Current News to Predict Changes in Violence

This article proposes a new method for predicting escalations and de-escalations of violence using a model which relies on conflict history and text features. The text features are generated from over 3.5 million newspaper articles using a so-called topic-model. We show that the combined model relies to a large extent on conflict dynamics, but that text is able to contribute meaningfully to the prediction of rare outbreaks of violence in previously peaceful countries. Given the very powerful dynamics of the conflict trap these cases are particularly important for prevention efforts

A Simple Joint Model for Returns, Volatility and Volatility of Volatility

We propose a model that allows for conditional heteroskedasticity in the volatility of asset returns and incorporates current return information into the volatility nowcast and forecast. Our model can capture all stylised facts of asset returns even with Gaussian innovations and is simple to implement. Moreover, we show that our model converges weakly to the GARCH-type diffusion as the length of the discrete time intervals between observations goes to zero.

Conditional Heteroskedasticity in the Volatility of Asset Returns

We propose a new class of conditional heteroskedasticity in the volatility (CHV) models which allows for time-varying volatility of volatility in the volatility of asset returns. This class nests a variety of GARCH-type models and the SHARV model of Ding (2021). CH-V models can be seen as a special case of the stochastic volatility of volatility model. We then introduce two examples of CH-V in which we specify a GJR-GARCH and an E-GARCH processes for the volatility of volatility, respectively.

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